The washing, treatment, and/or separation of tissue, for example to remove broken fat cell walls and contents, to remove chemicals introduced during the tissue removal process, to treat the removed tissue, or to separate excess fluid from removed tissue is often desirable. However, the washing, treatment, and/or refinement of tissue removed from a subject is particularly problematic, because conventional techniques for treating or washing the tissue often result in traumatic events for the tissue cells and increase the chance of microbe contamination.
In particular, conventional washing techniques have been time-consuming and expose the tissue to the hands of the surgical staff, exposes the tissue to the ambient air, and passes the tissue through different devices. This is because of the techniques involved: removing the tissue from the body; placing the removed tissue into a wash container; manually mixing sterile solution with the tissue; stirring the mixture; filtering it; centrifuging it; and then transferring it to the appropriate syringe for reinjection.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to reduce the time required to rid the specimen of unwanted, broken fat cell walls, broken fat cell contents, any other unnecessary extracellular fluid, as well as chemicals that have been introduced for anesthesia and vasoconstriction and/or to otherwise treat the removed tissue. In addition, it would be desirable to reduce the trauma to cells of removed tissue, and to reduce the chance of contamination of such tissue. Thus, there remains a great need for a streamline system for tissue harvest, refinement, preparation, and delivery.
Fat transfer is a procedure that is used to treat multiple disorders including post-traumatic injuries, congenital defects, and aesthetic problems. Fat transfer allows the affected soft tissue defect to be filled with autologous lipo-aspirate and offers the possibility of permanently repairing the affected area. One main reason for less widespread use of these techniques is that the entire process is cumbersome and requires multiple steps. These steps include harvesting, processing, and reinjection of the lipo-aspirate. These steps require multiple disposable and non-disposable tools. Each step also requires removal of the fat from the original collection container to another area for concentrating the fat and then placement of the fat, by hand, back into multiple syringes for injection. These multiple steps lengthen the procedure time and, because its switched from various syringes and collection devices, the fat has greater risk to be contaminated. If these processes can be simplified to utilize a single device for harvesting, processing, and reinjecting the lipo-aspirate, use of this technique can become more widespread.
The present invention overcomes these and other deficiencies in the art.